"When designing base technology, technological sovereignty is achieved", said Andres Hohendahl, IAAR director of Business Services, the Argentine artificial intelligence community (AI), said to  The group defines itself as critical to the establishment made up of foreign companies and defends the local creation of technologies. To achieve this potential, explained Hohendahl, it is necessary to create a network among Conicet, the School of Engineering and local companies. "There are a number of people trained to do it, they have the knowledge to do so and they could be agents that produce basic technology, but nobody is promoting these initiatives".

For Hohejdahl, the cost of licenses for foreign technology is worrisome and, fundamentally, the solution remains in a cloud outside the country, something that "is also a strategic issue, not just technology". Faced with a market monopolized by large multinational companies that are transforming the solution into a commodity, IAAR proposes a model that facilitates the stimulation and creation of startups to produce and export base technology, and thus make the use of AI to be accessible for Argentine companies. "To achieve this, companies must be willing to invest and investigate, something that happens in very few cases", said Hohendahl.

Risk Capital

In most cases it is difficult for companies to take risky investments to support the developments carried out by the university and the academic community. That type of agreement can generate benefits for all if a disruptive application is made.

To leverage initiatives such as the development of AI, Conicet is trying to guide research towards technology; Conicet evaluation system is oriented towards scientific production in areas such as biological sciences, food sciences or agronomy where there is a business interest because they are traditional fields of knowledge, but at least so far with little incorporation of technologies.

Guillermo Simari, professor of Logic and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University Universidad Nacional del Sur and director of the Research and Development Laboratory in Artificial Intelligence, explained that they work in an argumentative system that can be used to model the discussion in a debate. From the available information, the system can construct a favorable and an unforable argument for a given hypothesis.

Then, through a mechanism of comparison between arguments, the system can decide which is the best. "It is a cognitive assistant that can give support to lawyers in a trial", he said. From that university they develop an electronic government project with the Municipality of Bahía Blanca.

Cases and Trends

Companies that handle large volumes of data, such as banks and operators, are at the forefront in the use of AI with the implementation of chatbots for customer service. According to Hohendahl, "today natural language processing is the Holy Grail".

AIVO is an Argentine company that specializes in the creation of AI solutions for customer service, mainly developed with its own technology. BBVA, Visa, Galicia, AIG, Telefonica, AT&T, Claro and Personal are some of its clients and are interested in the chatbot of 147 of the Government of the City portal. "With the implementation of AgentBot, they increased attention capacity 10 times, generated 63% of conversation savings and reduced conversations transferred to an agent to 13%", said Martin Frascaroli, CEO of AIVO. By 2018, the company will focus its investment on increasing the capacity of machine learning, the driving of voice interaction and the integration of WhatsApp Business into its tools as a new channel to contact companies with their customers.

Another case is that of Eye Capital, an Argentine FinTech that works with quantitative finance. It developed an AI algorithm for real-time monitoring of markets, which allows decisions to be made about the purchase and sale of shares through logical rules. On the other hand, Ricoh is using the Enterprise Ricoh Intelligent Cognitive Assistant (ERiCA) at internal level, which allows it to speed up the attention in the area of ??technical support. With the focus on health and education verticals, they offer solutions that run on IBM Watson Explorer and Bluemix platform.

An example is the SmartDoctor application that interacts with natural, written or spoken language; with a cognitive platform, it analyzes and converts information into nomenclad pathologies to improve the quality of patient records. In addition, it offers statistical analysis and diagnostic suggestions. Another application is that which brings together scientific documents and provides a summary to health professionals. In Colombia and Mexico, they implement tools that allow them to analyze surveys with school students to determine the quality of teaching for teachers. Ana G. Montagna, Solutions Executive of Ricoh Argentina, stressed that for the next few years IA will converge with Cognitive Computing, and optimize the interpretation of large volumes of data.

This article was published in Convergencia Yearbook 2017.